This is an open letter to the LibreOffice-Discuss alias.

Hi all,

I came across a Microsoft AI video that I thought was interesting and food for thought here. The entire video is long, the link takes you directly to a demo of AI features in Office: https://youtu.be/H_X1ZuM6ZJU?t=1h12m27s

It shows an auto-designer, a better grammar checker, Intranet search and easy copy/paste, nice pen gestures, and analysis of spreadsheets (trends and outliers). He also references some other AI-powered features (quickstarter, researcher, my analytics, ink to math, ink to shape, math assistant)

There’s been a lot of progress in deep learning in the last few years. It is arguably overkill in many situations, but there are a lot of people working on it, and they are making continuous breakthroughs. There are some powerful Python libraries to consider integrating better into LibreOffice (perhaps via extensions) such as scikit-learn, nltk, PyTorch and Keras. There are C/C++ machine learning libraries that could be worth putting into LibreOffice also, and perhaps it has some already with the Calc solver.

It would be interesting to see a Deep Lightproof or other intelligent machine learning features one day. I tried to get the Java-based Language Tool working on my machine and didn’t manage, and it made LibreOffice stutter, and the UI was tiny / unreadable, etc. I don’t know if anyone has talked to them about the benefits of Python 😉

Regards,